Help me with my AVI - want to do a few things with it.

[The Dying Informant]

Hi,

I am recording PC game play - still haven't found the smoothest frame rate or one that records audio good with it. Besides that, Camstudio has been good. Anyway, I record AVIs with it. Now how can I edit a bunch of AVIS to put them together, and then how do I convert it to something smaller? Will I lose much quality doing this? What program is user friendly?

Also, the weird thing that I want to do (maybe impossible) is convert the finished combined AVI (made up of smaller ones) into a gif animation. Yeah I know... it will be quite a huge file for a gif too, but if its possible, I want to try. Hmm... I wonder what message boards have freedom of filesize for avatars. :P

I hope you can help, and sorry for probably repeating questions. There is so much to sort through that its hard to find what I specifically want to do is all.

[teegee420]

You can edit your Camstudio avi's with Virtualdub. I would say it is "user friendly" but not necessarily "newbie friendly". Go to the guides section and search by tool for Virtualdub. You'll find lots of guides on how to use it that way. For converting avi's to gif you can use a little program called, you guessed it, AVI-GIF.

[The Dying Informant]

Thank you very much!

Hmm, interesting sig - did you do something like that too?

I wonder also, can I copy some video off a DVD? Like a small clip? For personal use ofcourse.

[teegee420]

The sig is just a tiny clip of a movie I dug(Kill Bill Vol. I). You can rip a DVD to your hard drive with DVDdecrypter, then edit the VOB's with Virtualdub MPEG2 and save as avi. Or you can edit the VOB's with Womble MPEG2 VCR and save as mpeg.

[The Dying Informant]

Hmm.... VirtualDub doesn't seem too easy... can it even convert AVI to a compressed but still high quality format? And how?

And then there is a VirtualDub Mpeg? I don't understand why that is not built into normal virtual dub...

[teegee420]

Hmm.... VirtualDub doesn't seem too easy... can it even convert AVI to a compressed but still high quality format? And how?

How big is your source avi and what size would you like to make it? You can try and maintain quality when re-encoding but the nature of video compression is that you will lose some quality no matter what.

And then there is a VirtualDub Mpeg? I don't understand why that is not built into normal virtual dub...

The original Virtualdub supports mpeg-1, not mpeg-2.

[The Dying Informant]

Hmm well its a 2.5 MB file. The thing is it already looks compressed when I originally recorded it (though I recorded highest quality setting as far as I know - with Camstudio). I guess I don't want to lose yet more quality. But it seems kinda big for such a short video.

So the option to convert to another format is 're-encode'?

[teegee420]

What format do you want to convert to? Every time you convert, or re-encode you're going to diminish qualtiy to some degree. You think 2.5mb is too big?!

[The Dying Informant]

Hahah, no I don't. But its just a short video clip I want to upload to my very limited webspace, and I want my friends to check it out - not sure what they would consider large.

Maybe I don't want to convert yet, but I will make AVIs soon that I will want to convert. I just want to be sure how to.

[teegee420]

I think you should check out Dr. Divx. It's relatively simple to use and doesn't require a great deal of encoding knowledge. Results are decent too. Once you become comfortable with it, you should look into Virtualdub again. You can learn a lot by reading the tutorials in the guides section for Virtualdub conversions to Divx. Good luck.

[The Dying Informant]

It's too bad VirtualDub has to be complicated. I can't even look at the menus and guess what to do. As for DivX, is that a common format? Will it work for lots of people?

And now I realised about the AVI-GIF is not free at all. The trial version is limited to 100k or less files. I have never heard of a avi under 100k, how useful is THAT?

I will see if the tutorials can help me, but I'm not sure if they can.

[teegee420]

It's too bad VirtualDub has to be complicated. I can't even look at the menus and guess what to do. As for DivX, is that a common format? Will it work for lots of people?

Yes it's a common format. Anyone with Divx 5 or FFDSHOW can play Divx video.

And now I realised about the AVI-GIF is not free at all. The trial version is limited to 100k or less files. I have never heard of a avi under 100k, how useful is THAT?

Sorry, I'm not aware of any freeware GIF makers. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't needed to look for one.

I will see if the tutorials can help me, but I'm not sure if they can.

That's a real positive attitude. :P